Pages

29/08/2015

Billed as “part
opera, part protest, part drag show,” Sisters
Grimm’s La Traviata – co-produced
with Belvoir, and playing in Belvoir’s
Downstairs theatre – is a curious mash-up of Verdi’s opera (which was
recently playing
in Sydney), protest against the recent cuts to arts funding, and awkwardly gratuitous
breaking of the fourth wall. Unlike Sisters Grimm’s other shows – Summertime
in the Garden of Eden in particular – their customary verve for “queer DIY drag-theatre” does
not quite shine here, and I’m not sure if this production is as powerful yet as
it could be, as it is intended to be.

26/08/2015

Written in 1612, The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last
solo-authored play, and has been read (perhaps inaccurately) as a valediction
to the theatre. This Tempest
– John
Bell’s twenty-fifth anniversary production for Bell Shakespeare, and his last
as artistic director – could also be read as a valediction to the theatre as
much as to the company that bears his name, but that would be to do this
production a disservice. Here, on Bell’s
island – on the set, as much as in an imaginary space – I am certain magic was
worked, and this is a colourful, poignant, and fitting way to sign off from his
company.

19/08/2015

For thousands of young people across Australia
each year, Bell Shakespeare’s Actors
At Work programme brings the plays of William Shakespeare alive in an
accessible and vibrant way. A core part of Bell Shakespeare’s learning
programme since the company’s first season in 1990, Actors At Work travels the
country with little more than the Bard’s words and their imaginations, and
provides many students with their first experience of Shakespeare and/or live
theatre.

Like many of these students, John
Bell’s first introduction to Shakespeare came when he was at school. “I had a fantastic English teacher at that time who taught Shakespeare,
and took us off to see the Shakespeare movies, and any live theatre that came
to town, so I’d already got hooked on language and Shakespeare, poetry, some
novels of course… we did about six Shakespeare plays in my high school years –
two a year in great detail, so we got through it very thoroughly – and then I
got interested in performing.”

09/08/2015

Chekhov’s
reputation as a writer rests upon the legacy of his four major plays (The
Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard) and his short stories. Generally dismissed as
juvenilia or the work of an amateur writer, his earlier plays – and
particularly the play we generally call Platonov
– should not be so easily dismissed. While sources and critics disagree as to
its exact creation, the consensus is it was written when he was just eighteen,
and finished a few years later as a student in Moscow, and was originally intended for a
notable actress, in the hope she would stage it for her benefit performance.
Sources cannot agree on what happened next, but a (the?) manuscript was
discovered in 1914 (or 1920, depending on who you believe), and it has only
been since the 1950s that the play has found a wider popular and critical
audience, and it has been restored to its rightful place in Chekhov’s oeuvre.

08/08/2015

The
statistics are
staggering – on
average, one woman is killed every week as a result of intimate partner violence; one in three
women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence perpetrated by someone
known to them; one in four children are exposed to domestic violence, which is a
recognised form of child abuse; while two-thirds of domestic homicides are committed
by an intimate partner. These are not figures but people, lives which are
affected and often cut short by violence and/or abuse.Angus Cerini’s new
play The
Bleeding Tree – winner of the2014
Griffin Award – takes to this world with gusto and gives us a harrowing and
darkly-funny play in which women don’t die, but rather get their own back at
the man who has been such a violent presence in their lives.

Produced
by Griffin Theatre Company,
Cerini’s play unfolds upon Renée
Mulder’s steeply raked and pleated stage, and his words cascade and hurtle
around the little theatre, a potent and heady rush of adrenaline and relief in
chiaroscuro (courtesy of lighting designer Verity Hampson). But before a word
of Cerini’s script is spoken, we are thrust headfirst into the world of the
play – of a mother and her two daughters – by a swirling cresecendoing
soundstorm (Steve Toulmin) that shakes the theatre and our seats with unease
and trepidation. It’s a powerful mix, and in the hands of director Lee Lewis,
the three women – Paula Arundell as the mother, and Shari Sebbens and Airlie
Dodds as the daughters – never put a foot wrong on Mulder’s steep set.

05/08/2015

We’ve seen it
before – actors playing children and/or characters much younger than themselves –
in plays like David Holman’s The Small Poppies, and
more recently in Matthew
Whittet’s School
Dance and Girl, Asleep. In
fact, a lot of Whittet’s work draws on this conceit, something he readily
acknowledges in his writer’s note in this show’s program. But in Seventeen, it feels
like it has gone one step too far, that the joke has been over-extended and
stretched out to fill ninety-minutes’ worth of theatre.

02/08/2015

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of
Shakespeare’s perennial masterpieces – an effervescent concoction of magic,
darkness, dreams, comedy, and love, it is the first
Shakespeare play I studied at school, the first one I loved wholeheartedly,
and certainly one of the best introductions to the Bard’s work, and a play for
all ages. Presented here by SUDS (Sydney
University’s Dramatic Society) in the Seymour Centre’s York theatre, this ‘Dream’
has been given a slight reworking - inspired by a queer reading of the play - which opens up new spaces within the
four-hundred-year-old play and proves it can still be a fresh experience, even
if this is not your first encounter with the play.